Running Chick

I think winter is having a little fun with us.  Between Sunday and Friday, we had two storms that dumped 18-ish” of heavy, wet snow on us. Schools were closed and even MTU shut down early on Wednesday. Granted it was during the peak of the storm when visibility was next to nothing when they sent everybody out on the roads, but it’s the thought that counts, right? 

I snapped this photo Sunday morning, just before SNOWPOCALYPSE 2012 began.

Just a few hours later, when SNOWPOCALYPSE 2012 was raging, I took this photo of Josh plowing snow.

Nasty. Thank goodness for the tractor, though.  It saved our backs from having to deal with that mess using the snowblower/shovel. Except that on Monday morning it broke, so after work I scooped while Josh took apart the entire engine and attempted to get it running.  And then he had to order parts that weren’t going to come in until Wednesday, and that’s the day we got another nasty storm. Long story short, the parts came in, Josh did his magic to get it running, and when the storm died down around 9pm on Wednesday night, we joined the rest of the people in the neighborhood for a snow removal party. Fun! I got my exercise by digging  a path to the street for the tractor.  My back was not happy about that.

I lucked out with running this week. The storms were on Monday/Wednesday and I had runs scheduled for Tuesday/Thursday, so I didn’t have to take any weather-related skips.  I did my hill route on Tuesday and dropped 30 seconds per loop from last time. Thanks to all the scooping & shoveling on Wednesday, my legs were feeling especially tight and heavy when I headed out on Thursday.  It wasn’t one of my better runs.  I felt a little better on Saturday after a rest day on Friday, but not as good as I was hoping.  My eight miler was just okay. Oh well, what can you do, shit happens. Next week is a cut-back week so I’ll end up with around 11 miles. They will be easy miles, for sure.

Anyway, to summarize, Tuesday 4 @ 10:12; Thursday 4 @ 10:31 and Saturday 8 @ 11:27.

Here’s some pictures of some graffiti I spotted under the bridge on Saturday. Some folks have been busy.

And some final pics from the Copper Dog 150. I wasn’t able to get more than a few photos because I was too busy freezing my ass off working, but it was pretty cool to be right at the starting line.

These guys were drumming up support for the snow bike race on Saturday. Check out their tires. Fat.

Here’s the first team getting ready to head out. The dogs are built like marathon runners, tall and lean. Much different than the fluffy husky types that you usually expect to be pulling a sled. And, fast! When they took off, they took off. It was really impressive.

They’re also holy cow loud. They’re excited to run and they bark and whine and howl and make all sorts of weird noises in anticipation of taking off. One dog is bad enough, but most teams had eight dogs in their team and when they were all making noise together, the sheer volume of it was mind blowing.  I have a video of one particularly noisy team, but it’s stuck on my new fancy phone which I have yet to figure out how to work properly. And I’m supposedly an IT person. Yeah, right.